Hydrosocial Territories Research Articles

Power and politics across species boundaries: towards Multispecies Justice in Riverine Hydrosocial Territories

ABSTRACT Rivers have attracted increasing attention as politically contested entities. Existing literature on hydrosocial territories sheds light on how power relations and cultural-political hierarchies permeate rivers and their processes of territorialization, management, and governance. Yet, so far, the multispecies dimension of and in these processes remains under-addressed. This article helps fill in this gap by weaving together two central concepts: hydrosocial territories and multispecies justice. In this theoretical exploration we engage with rivers as living entities and territories co-created, co-inhabited, and actively reshaped by a diversity of human and other-than-human beings. We argue that acknowledging the latter’s agency, as well as the multiple ways in which power and politics constantly cross species boundaries in riverine territories, calls for a dialogue with the notion of multispecies justice (MSJ). We pose that MSJ can support, strengthen, and challenge movements, practices, and modes of relationship around the defence, conservation, and restoration of rivers.

Territorial Pluralism in China: Local Water Users’ Adaptation Strategies in the South–North Water Transfer Project

China’s South–North Water Transfer Project has been questioned as it has resulted in significantly negative issues. Drawing on the notion of hydrosocial territories, this article examines the contested hydraulic configuration and counter-imaginaries from local water users’ perspectives and their specific adaptation strategies in the South–North Water Transfer Project. This article argues that local water users in a Chinese context can only adopt adaptation strategies that are determined by their socio-economic backgrounds. This has led to significant social and environmental injustice. Addressing these issues is crucial for tackling inequities in the South–North Water Transfer Project and achieving the ambitious development goals of the project.

Hydrosocial Precarity and Postmillennial Indian Fiction: Reading Prayaag Akbar’s Leila

This paper aims to make a contribution to the debate on how hydropolitics help us understand the socio-spatial dynamics of urban space and identity formation by reading the speculative city in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017). The paper attempts to give Leila, frequently read under dystopic genre fiction, a hydropolitical reading, an overlooked critical paradigm, particularly in the context of postmillennial Indian fiction. To that end, it draws upon the concept of hydrosocial territories to spatialize the city-splitting in Leila. This kind of approach critically reconfigures water, as a new social, that shapes the spatial. The paper charts how the neoliberal “Council” in Leila governmentalizes the hydrosocial relations. Central to its hydroterritorial apparatus is the utilization of different contours, including pipe politics, water time, and hydraulic citizenship that induce hydrosocial precarity.

Fabricating Irrigators: Contested Hydrosocial Territories and Subject-Making in Spain’s Tagus–Segura Interbasin Transfer Arena

This article explores how irrigation farmer (regante) subjectivities are constructed in direct conjunction with the production of modernist–capitalist hydrosocial territories across the Tagus and Segura river basins in central and south-east Spain. We explore the complexities and contradictions of how, at various scales of governance, authorities establish and seek to realize ideal regante subjects across time and space. We mobilize a hydrosocial territory approach, combined with feminist political ecology and hegemony literature, to explore how such ideal subjects are built through Spanish and regional legislation and policies from 1866 to 2023. Through interviews with regantes in six irrigation communities, we identify different ideal and actual regante subjects in territories interconnected by the Tagus–Segura Aqueduct. We analyze how policy shifts lead to multiple and contradictory roles and responsibilities for regante subjects, which are linked to plot modernization, agricultural professionalization, and farmer rejuvenation. These sharpen divisions between smallholders and emerging large capitalist actors. Counterhegemonic territorial proposals resist these pressures by embodying alternative values and imaginaries. We conclude that through such counterhegemonic struggles, subject construction is enriched, identifying real-life existing and future alternatives for more just hydrosocial territories.

Sense-making and shaping of temporary wetlands: A socio-hydrological analysis of dichotomous ontologies of merjas in Morocco

There are quite different ways of making sense of wetlands: as wastelands to be drained and reclaimed, as hotspots of biodiversity to be preserved or restored, as buffer zones, or as hydrosocial territories in which people live and produce. We argue that such ontologies not only represent ‘a reality out there’ but help bring this reality into being by shaping the way wetlands are developed and used. The present study was conducted on temporary wetlands (merjas) in the Gharb plain (Morocco). Using a socio-hydrological approach, this research probes the origin of these ontologies and how they shape field realities. Qualitative data were collected during field surveys and focus groups while hydrological data were obtained by remote sensing. There are two main ways of seeing merjas that have led to two different enactments – a ‘State’ one, that has drained and developed the land and re-distributed it to farmers of its choice; and a ‘local’ one, that of riverine communities who have learned to live with land–water dynamics, who now also claim part of this reclaimed land for their own children. The view of temporary wetlands as ecological systems has been restricted to three particular merjas, thereby obliterating the ecological role of others. Since the 2009/2010 floods, the idea of merjas as buffer zones to protect agricultural and urban areas has been under discussion. Although the idea is rejected by most actors, in practice, merjas will continue to play this role during major floods in the future, as upstream dams are generally managed with the aim of resilience to drought. We show how each ontology is connected to different networks of people, resulting in different enactments that sometimes co-exist and sometimes clash. Creating space for negotiation for the future of merjas remains challenging, given the changing water flows and the persistent co-existence of ontologies, as the people connected to it aim to enact their own version of the merja.

From Watershed Moment to Hydrosocial Movement: Patagonia without Dams and The Free-Flowing Rivers Network in Chile

In this article, we examine how social movement activists draw on the hydrosocial dynamics of the watershed unit to build a river protection network in resistance to extractivist development. We apply a critically engaged activist anthropological focus, and drawing on four years of collaborative fieldwork, we describe how activists formed a hydrosocial movement to reconfigure Chile as an interconnected territory of living watersheds. In 2014, the Patagonia Without Dams movement successfully stopped the development of a mega-dam complex in Chilean Patagonia, catalyzing a major upheaval in environmental politics. The Free-Flowing Rivers Network harnessed momentum from Patagonia Without Dams and jumped scales from place-based campaigns that defend singular rivers against dams to translocal actions that protect watersheds from an array of extractive industries. We show how this movement bridged rural and urban conflict zones, seeking to protect watersheds from forms of extractivism beyond dams, including mining and irrigation projects. By focusing on the Free-Flowing River Network’s efforts to translate its political-ecological platform into policy, we show how hydrosocial territories may be established, defended, expanded, and stabilized through strategies that explicitly connect water and society.

Patterns of injustices in water allocation mechanisms in the Brazilian Amazon: Palm oil expansion and the reshaping of hydrosocial territories

This study examines how state mechanisms for water allocation and enforcement shape patterns of injustice in water management among various actors in the Brazilian state of Pará, particularly in the context of palm oil production expansion. Our aim is to broaden the analysis of agribusiness expansion and its impact on water resources beyond agricultural practices and socioeconomic impacts. Therefore, we analyze water injustices by mapping water governance, analyzing the distribution of water resource permits, verifying the recognition of local communities’ ways of relating to rivers and water bodies, and analyzing political representation in decision-making processes regarding water governance. Our results reveal that weak water governance and the distribution of water use permits are reconfiguring hydrosocial territories, reinforcing power asymmetry relationships, and benefiting agribusiness interests at the expense of local communities. This, in turn, has adverse effects on water pollution. Our study demonstrates how the absence of recognition and representation of diverse ways of water usage and existence in the territory in state water governance, combined with the presence of multiple actors and overlapping hydrosocial projects, can lead to conflicts and injustices.

Hydrosocial territories in transition: Implications of traditional agricultural and irrigation water management practices under the effects of social, institutional, and environmental changes in Ladakh, India

Traditional societies have played a vital role in the management and development of their local environments through their knowledge and practices. The engagement of people with their immediate environment has historically shaped the landscapes and their way of life. This reciprocal relationship between human beings and their natural environments, both in its historical and contemporary perspectives, is significant in sustainability research. Ladakh in India is a high-altitude cold desert region. Water is a scarce resource, and the local communities have developed unique water management practices that shape livelihoods and landscapes. This study aims to analyze the traditional water management practices in Ladakh through the lens of human–nature relationships to establish its significance in the contemporary regional context. It utilizes primary survey data and GIS to establish how traditional water management practices are bounded by hydrosocial territories. Using the social-ecological systems framework, this study identifies the changes experienced by these hydrosocial territories in the context of social, institutional, and environmental spheres. The results from this study contribute to the scholarship on hydrosocial territories in Ladakh that represent a balanced human–nature relationship by means of traditional water management practices, and highlight its significance in framing policies for sustainable management of scarce water resources in the region.

The role of hydrosocial heritages produced by hydrosocial territories in understanding environmental conflicts: The case of Sélune dam removals (France)

Dam removal has become one of the most widespread tools for river restoration; however, these projects can be conflictual. Our aim in this paper is to question the disconnection between the ecological project and the territorial project and to evaluate its role in the emergence of conflicts. Conceptually, we draw on a hydrosocial territory perspective to link the sociopolitical and economic context to the production of a new materiality sustained by power relationships. We focus on the removal of two large dams on the Sélune River in Normandy, France, which has fueled a conflict that has lasted for a decade. By combining multiple data sources (semi-directive interviews, focus group, archives), we highlight five successive and overlapping phases since the dams’ construction at the beginning of the 20thcentury. Each of these periods are characterized by the (dis)empowerment of certain stakeholders, the evolution of the material environment, and the fluctuation of the hydrosocial territory scales. The case of the Sélune highlights the importance of including long-term historical perspectives in the concept of hydrosocial territory, i.e. thinking about hydrosocial heritages. Hydrosocial heritages constitute a new way to approach non-human actors by taking the historical and contemporary relationships between humans and non-humans into account. It also helps situate the dynamics of a conflict in a deeper historical process, revealing how past dynamics shape contemporary situations.

Connected and disrupted hydrosocial territories: the making of modern socionatures through inter-basin water transfers

Actual and projected water scarcity has accelerated the scale of hydrological infrastructure and the number of Inter-Basin Water Transfers (IBWTs), which move freshwater from one geographically distinct river catchment or basin to another. IBWTs are supply-side programs that pose distinct water governance challenges. If all projected IBWTs are completed by 2050, the volume of water transferred would be 48% of global water withdrawals. This article examines IBWTs from a socionatural perspective. Building on the political ecology scholarship of hydrosocial territories, I probe how IWBTs co-constitute and reconfigure socionatural relations, and how these are experienced by communities and ecologies in unequal ways. I discuss how IBWTs bring about changes, what features of hydrosocial territories they influence, and what conflicts emerge. For 29 IBWTs I define their multiple socionatural dimensions – biophysical, socioeconomic and governance – and the interrelations between them. IBWTs generally degrade biophysical and socioeconomic conditions for communities in water-sending "donor" basins, and condition future territorial reconfigurations. Water governance institutions are ill-equipped to take on the challenge that IBWTs bring in governing across multiple basins, indicated by the conflicts they generate. These concern defense of territory and ways of life, as well as allocation disputes. Political conflicts emerge because worlds shift irrevocably when IBWTs become fixtures of hydrosocial territories.

Engaging with Water and Rivers from a Multispecies Justice Perspective

Rivers are ecosystems indispensable for the survival of both humans and non-human species. Yet humans often disregard their importance and modify the existing socio-natural equilibrium of rivers in the pursuit of economic and political agendas. With a focus on new water justice movements, this article advocates a perspective that recognizes rivers as hydrosocial territories, actively and continuously co-created, co-inhabited, and transformed by a multiplicity of human and other-thanhuman beings. Such a perspective opens a path to a multispecies justice framework that involves rethinking the relations between human and non-human beings in the worlds we share as a medium for creating more socio-ecologically just and biodiverse water worlds.

Payment for watershed services and the coordination of interests in transboundary rivers: China's Xin'an River Basin Eco-compensation pilot

Through the case of China's Xin'an River Basin Eco-compensation Pilot (XRBEP), this study mobilizes the concept of hydrosocial territories to scrutinize how the watershed conservation behavior of stakeholders in payment for watershed services (PWS) evolves in response to eco-compensation and the coordination of interests. By drawing on the extensive literature on differential games, this study opens up our view of the complex relationship between PWS and the coordination of interests. After comparing the simulated and actual results of XRBEP, this study highlights that the coordination of interests in transboundary PWS can ultimately be socially optimal by reconciling the interests of different administrative territories. Furthermore, designing incentive-compatible coordination mechanisms of interest in transboundary PWS remains challenging, depending on the reconfiguration of PWS hydrosocial territories. Finally, the horizontal eco-compensation as a PES-like application can maximize the supply of watershed services, thus becoming a suboptimal and realistic option for realizing transboundary PWS.

Constructing payments for ecosystem services hydrosocial territories through assemblage practices: China’s Xin’an river basin eco-compensation pilot

This study employs the case of China’s Xin’an River Basin Eco-compensation Pilot to explore how the payments for ecosystem services (PES) can configure local water control arenas through various assemblage practices. The findings demonstrate that specific assemblage practices can construct a PES hydrosocial territory, which often reflects power struggles. We argue that the dynamic assemblage practices redefine the boundaries of the PES hydrosocial territory and trigger the reconfiguration of PES scalar territory. Finally, we draw attention to the critical role that state intervention plays in constructing China’s PES hydrosocial territory, reflecting China’s remarkable governance rationality and technology. Therefore, beyond the existing interpretation of PES hydrosocial territory, the analysis of the remaking of the Xin’an River Basin has promoted the study of hydropolitics to understand better the role of assemblage practices in PES hydrosocial territory.

China's Water Governmentality and the Shaping of Hydrosocial Territories in the Lancang-Mekong Region

AbstractThis paper examines China's water governmentality in advancing the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC). It attends to how discourses, used as a political instrument, are framed, justified and contested in the reshaping of international hydrosocial territories. China's official and popular discourses present the LMC as promoting multilateral politics, economic benefits and social integration, while they obscure polarizing politics, external interventions and regional conflicts. Using strategies of positive publicity first, top-down communication and mutual empathy creation, these discourses aim to deflect attention away from controversies and geopolitics in the region to construct governable hydrosocial territories. However, in a transnational context where the Chinese state cannot unilaterally control geographical imaginaries, alternative discourses depict China as a “hydro-hegemon” that poses threats to downstream countries. The discursive dichotomy reflects multiple ontologies of water and power struggles in international river governance, bringing regional stability and sustainable development into question.

Water assemblages in hydrosocial territories: Connecting place, space, and time through the cultural-material signification of water in coastal Peru

This article analyzes how smallholders of Subtanjalla, in coastal Peru, conceive irrigation water as a central element and carrier of hydrosocial relations and territories. We base our analysis on an exploration of the local notions of agua nueva and yocle. These two notions bind together time, space, nature and culture into specific understandings of territorial connections and reciprocities. Through these understandings water is much more than H2O. Instead of just representing an economic good or a material input for irrigated agriculture water is seen as a binding element that bridges and brings together the Andean world with that of Subtanjalla in the Peruvian coast. Water is, from this perspective, a lively and always in-the-making composition of humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans in which there is no clear distinction between nature and culture, past and present, object and subject. We argue that water as an assemblage opens up now lines of inquiry into hydrosocial territories and relations across time and space through the departure of a fundamentally relational understandings of water, its use and governance.

Waterscapes and hydrosocial territories: Thinking space in political ecologies of water

Over the past two decades, ‘waterscape’ and ‘hydrosocial territory’ have gained momentum in political ecologies of water. These concepts explore the material outcomes of the interplay of social and biophysical processes by building on two different core concepts of geography (‘landscape’ and ‘territory’). Relying on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus comprising 113 articles (1999–2019), this paper investigates the commonalities and divergences in the spatialities of water that these concepts convey. We show that the two concepts delineate two close but nevertheless different analytical threads with regard to water-related spatialities. Yet, the use of the concepts waterscape or hydrosocial territory does not directly result from a theorisation of space that would be specific to different spatial contexts, but rather from what is studied in these spaces, that is, the socio-spatial inequalities or injustices that characterise them, and the transformations – either radical or incremental – that shape them.

(Re)making hydrosocial territories: Materializing and contesting imaginaries and subjectivities through hydraulic infrastructure

Infrastructures and their roles and connections to and in territories and territorialization processes have increasingly become objects of study in political geography scholarship. In this contribution, we build on these emerging insights and advance them by further conceptually disentangling the agential role of infrastructure. We bring together the notions of territory, governmentality, imaginaries and subjectivities, to clarify how exactly hydraulic infrastructure acts to transform relations between space, people and materiality. We start by introducing territorialization as a process of ‘ordering things’ in a certain space and time through different techniques of government. We then show how, at the base of such territorialization processes, are imaginaries that contain normative ideas about how space and socio-territorial relations should be ordered. Imaginaries are consequently materialized through hydraulic infrastructure through the inscription of morals, values and norms in infrastructure design, construction and operation. This set of materialities and relations embedded in infrastructure brings changes to the existing relations between space, water and people. In particular, we highlight the repercussions of infrastructure for how people understand and relate to each other, the environment, water, technology and space: in other words, how subjectivities change as an effect of hydraulic infrastructure constitution. Last, we show how infrastructure and the related hydrosocial territories that develop around it are a dynamic arena of contestation and transformation. We argue that socio-material fractures, emerging counter-imaginaries and the disruptive capacities of subjectivities constantly challenge the ‘fixes’ that infrastructures aim to inscribe in hydrosocial territories. Throughout the paper, we use empirical examples from recent research on hydraulic infrastructure and territorial transformations to ground the conceptual ideas.

Water access and the national water and sanitation policy – alterations and implications for São Paulo State's hydrosocial territories, Brazil (in Portuguese).

Water access and the national water and sanitation policy – alterations and implications for São Paulo State's hydrosocial territories, Brazil (in Portuguese).

State, economic power, and citizen mobilization in the construction of hydrosocial territories in La Laguna region, States of Durango, and Cohahuila, Mexico (in Spanish)

State, economic power, and citizen mobilization in the construction of hydrosocial territories in La Laguna region, States of Durango, and Cohahuila, Mexico (in Spanish)

Hydrosocial extractive territories: Gold, sugarcane and contested water politics in El Salvador

In 2017 El Salvador became the only country in the world to ban notoriously water-degrading metal mining. Seemingly, Salvadorans chose “water over gold.” However, situating the ban within the country’s ongoing commitment to extractivism problematizes this narrative. This paper asks what water politics drive El Salvador’s anti-metal mining and pro-extractive politics? Drawing on political ecologies of extractivism and hydrosocial territories literatures, I propose a hydrosocial extractive territories analytic to examine how extractive and anti-extractive activities mutually produce one another through their socionatural relations to water. I show how El Salvador’s anti-metal mining and pro-agrarian extractivism politics reflect gold and sugarcane's distinct, yet entangled, material, discursive, and political economic relations to the Lempa River. I conclude that the “water over gold” narrative simultaneously helped create a broad-based social movement that propelled the metal mining ban and internalized commitments to ongoing extractivism. More fundamentally, the Salvadoran case demonstrates that extractive and anti-extractive politics are not necessarily antithetical or antagonistic. They can be mutually constitutive.